Funny Man Steve Carell Challenges Our Notions of Style and Image

It’s hard to look at Steve Carell and take him seriously. When you see him dressed impeccably in this grey suit with a beige tie as he did at the ShoWest awards you realize that he has the same drive to convey a professional, well put together image across just like the rest of us. Maybe we would buy that image if he did not play characters that appear to be an extension of his ordinary self, almost in the same way that Bill Cosby did on the Cosby Show. When we see Steve Carell on screen, in The Office, Evan Almighty or The 40 Year Old Virgin, his character is the guy who forces us to think of exactly why we put so much time into our appearance in the first place.

The 40 Year Old Virgin starts out through showing us the meticulousness of appearance of Andy Stitzer, an individual working a dead end job at an electronics retailer who seems to be transplanted from the eighties into the present. Yet he meets Trish, a diamond in the rough who herself would probably be more desirable if she were more visible and presentable.

But do clothes really make the man and is a personal clothing style alone enough to convey desired image? Steve Carell’s fashion sense may not employ the intellectual seriousness of writers such as Woody Allen or lack the anti-fashionable pretense of Ray Ramano and Jerry Seinfeld, but he does show us that the image is defined by WHO is wearing the clothes as much as by what and which way it is worn.

- Chris Kendalls